Bank surveillance bill could lead to greatest miscarriage of justice in British history, disabled activist tells MPs

A disabled activist has told MPs that parliament could set in train the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history, if it approves new laws that would force banks to carry out mass surveillance of millions of disabled people.

Rick Burgess, from Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, told a Commons committee on Tuesday that the proposed new powers were adding to an “absolutely enormous” level of “anger and distress in the disabled community”.

He said the bill appeared to be a new “attack” on disabled people and to be motivated by “ableist assumptions about how disabled people run their lives, or whether they’re more or less honest, or whether they’re more or less genuine than people who are not disabled”.

He told work and pensions minister Andrew Western, Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould, and backbench MPs: “It’s really, really hard going for us. I have to tell you that.

“Disabled people in Britain have had a decade and a half of being the scapegoat of this country. And it has to stop.

“And this measure is actually making it worse, as opposed to stopping that scapegoating.”

He was giving evidence to the Commons committee examining the government’s public authorities (fraud, error and recovery) bill.

The government plans to use the bill to force banks to examine individuals’ accounts for potential breaches of benefit eligibility rules and then pass that information to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The government currently plans to use the new powers to focus on claimants of universal credit, pension credit, and employment and support allowance (ESA).

Burgess (pictured) told MPs on the committee that, even if there was an error rate of just 0.1 per cent during this process, that would still mean thousands of people showing up as “false positives”, even if it just examined those on means-tested benefits.

He said: “Bear in mind, the Post Office scandal is less than a thousand people.

“You are at the inception stage of something which could be the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history.”

He also warned of the impact of the new powers on people with diagnoses such as paranoia, schizophrenia, depression or anxiety, as it would add to their feeling of “being monitored, of being followed, of being surveilled, because you quite literally are being surveilled by your bank on behalf of the government”.

And he said the bill treated disabled people as “a separate population who should have lower rights to privacy than the general population” and was “further marking disabled people for additional state oppression and surveillance”.

He said: “Give that the United Nations has condemned the UK twice in a row for grave and systemic human rights abuses, this is further going in the wrong direction and failing to address those failures identified by the United Nations.”

He added: “We’ve continued to go down a road that is removing rights and not respecting them and subjecting disabled people to greater scrutiny, greater surveillance and greater tests of their basic rights to be a citizen of this country.”

Western, the minister for transformation in DWP, said he accepted that the new powers may lead to “some indirect discrimination against disabled people” because they were over-represented in the three groups subject to the new powers.

But Burgess said he believed it was even worse than that and would cause direct discrimination of disabled people, and he called for “public and transparent equality impact assessments”.

He said there was an over-representation of disabled people among the groups who will be subject to the new powers, and they were already “exhaustively monitored, reviewed, tested, having to provide proof, whether it’s for a blue badge, for PIP, for ESA, for universal credit, for a concessionary pass on public transport.

“I mean, the life of a disabled person is to be constantly tested, examined, having to produce proof, and this is another step in that.”

Burgess suggested that it would be fairer – although still a significant breach of privacy – if the government applied the new laws to everyone.

This is because the tax gap – the proportion of tax owed that the government is unable to collect – is more than £39 billion a year, more than four times bigger than the benefit fraud and error the government is targeting through the bill.

He told Western: “I would suggest that the reason you don’t subject the whole country to it is because there’d be outrage because people would find their rights to privacy being completely abused.

“If you’re happy to have your bank account monitored in this way, fine, but you’ve not suggested this should apply to the general population.”

In response to Burgess’s concerns, Western said that, although there were “some things there that I don’t recognize as part of the bill, but clearly that is how people are feeling and the people that you represent are feeling.

“I’m very happy to ask officials to pick up a conversation to go through the detail there.”

The committee also heard from Geoff Fimister, head of policy for Inclusion Barnet’s Campaign for Disability Justice.

He said the new powers would “disproportionately affect disabled people because disabled people are more likely to be on low incomes than others”.

He also raised concerns about the risk of “false positives” when banks trawl people’s accounts.

Fimister said that “even a small percentage of a big number is a lot of people, and people being left without any income, if the technology triggers the cessation of the benefit, it’s a serious business.

“Not having any income can cause hardship, death, and lots of stress.”

He called for a safeguard where benefits could not be stopped “unless and until it had been established” that there was an overpayment of benefits, rather than the proposed “shoot first and ask questions later approach” where DWP thinks there might have been fraud “because the tech spotted something”.

He told the committee: “There is a really raw feeling among disabled people that they are being targeted, and in the context of quite a lot of negative media publicity around the interface between employment and unemployment among disabled people, it is an unpleasant atmosphere for disabled people.”

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